Wilful Impropriety (44 page)

“Oh, damn,” she said. “It’s only you.”

I looked at the crushed and tattered cigar beneath her prim boot heel.

“Too bad,” I said. “Now I’ll have to smoke alone.”

“What?”

“That was the bargain. My silence for one of your father’s cigars.” I held out my hand.

She pouted at me. “And what if I refuse?”

I leaned forward, every inch the boy. If I was to be taken for one, I definitely had to play the part. “Then I’ll need a little something more to assure my silence.” I touched the brim of my cap and hoped I gave her a knowing enough glance.

I was quite taken aback when she played along, a wicked tilt to the corner of her mouth. “And just what might that be?”

I edged closer. “Oh, I think you know very well.”

“Do I?” she said.

Up until that moment, I truly had been playing a role. I had played it with many girls, even swaggered to a few baitings and other such sport with a dollymop or two on my arm. But always I’d left them as I found them, to the point where a few of them grumbled I must have a preference for men. Yet they’d never been able to prove that, either, more’s the pity. I had, up until this point, stayed out of affairs of the heart. My mother had suffered far more than I thought anyone should in the name of Venus.

But the way Willie moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue, the heart-fluttering expectancy of her face, dissolved all my pretenses. Though I had never done it, I knew the way of it, having witnessed it often enough from one end of the rookery to the other.

I touched my lips to hers. And when she yielded, I opened my mouth just a little, in the way the French girls did for paying customers up at the palace. The jolt of my tongue against hers surprised her, for she made a sweet little whimper. She must have liked it, however, because she let me continue.

I was just beginning to realize how much
I
liked it when we heard the door slam and feet come pounding down the stairs.

“Oh, dear Lord,” she whispered against my lips. I pulled away and knelt, pretending to pick up the crushed cigar, just before a scullery maid rounded the corner. She frowned when she saw us, saying “Miss Grace” as she hurried by as if she was spitting rather than saying her mistress’s name.

We both only allowed ourselves to laugh when we saw her disappear into the busy street beyond.

High color appeared on her cheek. “You must think me awful,” she said, looking into my eyes and daring me to think she was anything but impudent and beautiful because of it. “All you wanted was a cigar!”

I took her hand, covered in lace wristlets and soft wherever mine was rough. I lowered my mouth to it as I held her gaze. “You, milady, are far better than any cigar,” I murmured.

She blushed fully at that, but didn’t withdraw her hand.

How much I yearned to kiss her again in that moment! I had long wondered what the allure of such romantic rituals might be for those I’d seen engaged in them, but now I understood.

And yet, I also didn’t. There was so much that escaped me. She was looking at me as any girl looks at her beau, full of hope and longing, ripe as an apple for the plucking, and yet I knew in my heart that she could never be mine. She was further above me than the moon. Not only because of her status and position, but also because of her very sex. If she ever found out what I was . . .

I dropped her hand. “Time for me to be off,” I said.

“That’s it?” she said. “I won’t see you again?”

“Not likely,” I said. It was all I could do not to flinch at the coldness in my voice.

To her credit, there was only a little widening of those sapphire eyes to give me any hint of her feelings. She lifted her chin and turned back toward the door of her house. “Good day, then, Mr . . . ?”

“Wells,” I said. “Jonathan Wells.”

“Mr. Wells,” she said. Then, she sailed by me, her silken skirts brushing my leg.

“And to you, Miss Grace,” I said, wishing my heart didn’t feel like lead in my chest. Wishing most of all that I’d never kissed her and discovered just how wonderful it was.

•   •   •

I delivered the documents from Willie’s father to my customer in Nova Scotia Gardens, hard by a debtor’s cemetery and laystall pit. My man was a wily, louring fellow called Jack Stirabout. What his real name was I never knew, nor did I ask. There were rumors he’d once been a butcher, and I didn’t doubt that from the size of his great arms and barrel of a torso. He couldn’t read but only a little, but he understood at least what the surgeon’s signature meant. And when he looked at me, he seemed to see clean through me, like he knew all at once what I was and what I only pretended to be.

“Well enough, then,” he said, upon seeing the doctor’s hand on the documents. “We’ll have the first shipment for the good doctor by the end of the week. See you’re here late Friday, eh?”

“Yessir.” I thought I said it smartly enough, but the next thing I knew Jack’s fingers were twisted up in my collar.

“You walk around here like some sort of bloody peacock, you do, but let me just lesson you, my lad. If you so much as breathe a word of any of this to anyone”—he turned my face to look at the gravestones and pits of offal—“you’ll be eating shit at the bottom of a hole with the rest of ’em! And if you don’t show, I promise you’ll be doing the same!”

He shook me once. “You understand?”

He let me go, and I straightened my jacket and collar. “Yessir,” I said, keeping my voice as even as I could. I cursed Tom under my breath for recommending me for this job.

“Right,” Jack said. He tossed a few coins at me, which landed all around my feet. “Sod off!”

I picked up the coins as fast as I could and made for my room above the gin palace. Having a room all to oneself was a luxury most could ill afford, but I managed it through the kindness of Mrs. Pennyforth, a good-hearted woman who was grateful to me for keeping the worst of the drunkards away from her girls. Plenty of bluster and one well-placed punch was usually enough to scare the idiots off, but this Jack Stirabout fellow was something else entirely.

I hoped he never went to the doctor’s house and found Willie Grace. The thought of his giant, dirty hands on her . . . I shuddered. But there was no reason to think he ever would meet her—why should he? I was the one who would bring the deliveries to the surgeon, and no one else.

Tom had said this was a good, respectable job, but I was beginning to think he had set me up. I suppose it wouldn’t surprise me if he had, truthfully. People here would sooner stab you in the back as look at you, especially if you’d toppled one of the rulers of the roost like I had. Billy Jenx had been easy to overthrow. Jack Stirabout, though?

There were bruises around my throat where he’d grabbed me around the collar. I considered not showing up on Friday. I could always find other work, I knew. But Jack had promised me pain if I didn’t show, and I knew he’d not hesitate to deliver.

And then there was also the hope that I’d see Miss Wilhemina Constance Grace. I sat on the creaking rope bed, suddenly too tired even to go down for supper. My lips burned with the memory of kissing her, and I couldn’t tell if I felt shame or fear or whatever else that brief feeling had been when she’d melted toward me, sweeter than sugar.

All I knew was that it couldn’t ever happen again.

•   •   •

I fought with myself all day about going back to Jack Stirabout on Friday, but in the end, I did it. I went back to Shoreditch around the stroke of midnight. I waited there, chafing my hands and stomping my feet against the cold, nervous as a cat on hot irons.

They came through the darkness, shadows made of even deeper shadow until they showed themselves to be men. Jack and two others I didn’t know.

He was kinder this time, clapping me on the shoulder and calling me “lad” as though we’d known one another all our lives. One of his helpers threw a burlap sack over my shoulder. I thought I saw stains as he transferred it, but then it was resting heavy and warm against my back. I didn’t want to know.

“Go on, then,” Jack said. “Next week, we’ll see how you handle an even heavier load.” This time his hand on my shoulder was so hard it nearly toppled me.

He laughed and then he and his lackeys disappeared back the way they’d come.

I carried it, trying to stick to the shadows as much as I was able, avoiding all the most well-known constable beats. I entered through the back alley, went up the steps, and rang the bell as I’d been told.

The butler, silent as always, opened the door. He took the burlap sack, which was indeed marked with an ever-expanding dark stain, gave me much less coin than I was expecting, and shut the door.

I stood there for long moments in the flickering light of the gas lantern, staring at the door, before I turned and went back to my little room, feeling more burdened than I had earlier.

When the next Friday came, I found myself more reluctant than ever. I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about the stained burlap sack and its potential contents. Nor had I been able to cease thinking about Willie and our impertinent kiss. My thoughts swayed between them, much like the sack I’d carried—heavy and coarse and stained with all that I didn’t understand.

Nonetheless, rent was due soon. And Mrs. Pennyforth, despite the “family discount,” as she put it, was unyielding on timeliness.

When I arrived at Nova Scotia Gardens, Jack Stirabout was waiting for me with a long sack slung over his back. There could be no mistaking what this was, what they were. An iron spike of fear drove down my spine.

Resurrection men. I’d heard it whispered about that there were men who, for a price, would steal corpses from churchyards for anatomists and surgeons. That some men up in Edinburgh had even been caught murdering people to fit the descriptions the anatomists gave.

I swallowed hard. Before I could back away, Jack came and threw the corpse over my shoulder. I nearly collapsed—it must have weighed as much as I did, if not more. While I was used to toting heavy loads in the brickyards where I’d once worked, so many stones of dead weight, so to speak, wasn’t easy to take on all at once.

“Steady on, lad,” Jack said, his voice thick with drink, “you’ve got a long way to go with that one! Best get moving!”

He gave me a shove that nearly sent me to my knees again.

“You don’t really expect me to carry this all the way to Kensington?” I said.

His eyes narrowed. “I expect you to do what you’re told. Or there’ll be worse than bruises around that pretty throat of yours!”

He stalked toward me, and it wasn’t just the weight of the corpse that made my knees tremble. It was as if he’d known what I was all along and was taunting me, promising me pain if for one moment I dared to give up this charade.

I turned and started back the way I’d come.

There were lots of stops and starts along the way, times when I very nearly abandoned the terrible weight on my shoulder and ran. And then I would think of that doctor and what he might do to anything or anyone in his path if he didn’t get his precious delivery. I would think about how it might just be possible that Willie would be out in the alley smoking again (though heaven knew that was a terribly slim possibility).

“Oy!” someone shouted.

I’d been keeping to the shadows with my burden as best I could, always with an eye toward perhaps stealing a handcart if the opportunity presented itself. But thus far, luck hadn’t been in my favor.

I looked round and dread turned my feet to stone. A con stable was headed toward me, holding his lantern up and shaking his wooden rattle at me to tell me he meant business.

There was only one thing I could do.

I dropped the body and ran.

He shouted and rattled even more imperiously, but, relieved of my burden, I streaked through the darkness like a shot. I cursed under my breath at the inanity of it—Jack Stirabout and his rabble had clearly meant me to fail. And even as I ran, I worried that perhaps it would have been better to stand firm and take my punishment. Yet I guessed that Jack had people even on the inside. There would be no way I could escape him, unless somehow I had the ear of a wealthy patron like Wilhemina Constance Grace.

I went to my little room. Though of course I had boltholes around the city, my room was closest, and I desired the heat and light of the gin palace to chase away the terror of the dark.

I got hideously drunk that night, and nearly allowed two girls to drag me off together before I remembered myself enough to beg off, and hauled myself up the opposite set of stairs to my own room.

I woke with a start the next day, jolting out of bed to the resounding throb of a headache that seemed almost bigger than my own head. I was surprised that they hadn’t come for me in the night as soon as they’d discovered my duplicity.

I gathered up all the coin I’d saved and stowed in various places throughout the room. It wasn’t much, but it might buy me a train passage to somewhere. Anywhere was better than London now. I even tossed about the notion of passage to America, but there wasn’t quite enough for that. Though I could have stowed away, the idea of hiding in a swaying, rat-infested hold for months didn’t sit well with me at all. Perhaps I was getting lazy.